Guns per Capita by Country Vs Crime Rate: Top 20 Countries

Ramish Cheema
10 min read

In This Article:

In this piece, we will take a look at guns per capita per country vs crime rate. If you want to skip our analysis of crime and gun statistics as well as the gun industry, head on over to Guns per Capita by Country Vs Crime Rate: Top 5 Countries.

Among the handful of issues that cause vibrant debate in America, gun ownership sits at the top. America is one of the most unique countries in the world in the form that its constitution explicitly allows the population to own firearms. Tracing its roots back to the American Revolution, which saw a rag tag army of rebels beat the world's most well trained army at the time, owning guns, according to advocates, is what makes America, America.

Naturally, this also leads to a large number of guns in America, with the country having the highest number of guns per capita in the world. However, this statistic is misleading, since it does not accurately describe how many Americans actually own guns. As a simple example, imagine that there are ten people in America, and out of these, five own one thousand guns while the others don't own a firearm. On a per capita basis, this would imply that the U.S. has 100 guns per person - which, in our example, is far from reality.

Therefore, it's clear that gun ownership statistics merit a deeper look. On this front, a study from the Justice Department from 1997 shares more insight. Its data shows that only 25% of Americans had actually owned a gun, and 74% of all gun owners had more than one gun. In fact, the ratio of gun ownership is actually quite different from what intuition would suggest. Using data from the National Survey of Private Ownership of Firearms—NSPOF, the study shows that the top twenty percent of all gun owners actually owned 55% of the guns. In terms of absolute figures, ten million people owned 105 million guns - for an average of ten guns per person, and the remaining 87 million guns were owned by 34 million people  - for an average of 2.6 guns per person. The population of the U.S. was 263 million in 1994 - indicating that only 16.7% of Americans had actually owned a weapon.

One major argument that surfaces in favor of gun ownership is that it allows people to defend themselves against crime and aggression. After all, criminals will find a way to buy guns on the black market even if they were outright banned; however, ordinary people often do not have access to these channels. Hence, the argument goes that potentially banning gun ownership in America carries the risk of leaving people more vulnerable to crime. Well, the Justice Department's data shows that 3.1 million would have used guns for defensive purposes, with the total incidence of such uses estimated at 23 million. However, tightening the criteria of defensive gun use reduces the number of people to 1.5 million.

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